Tuesday, July 19, 2016

SocArXiv debuts, as SSRN acquisition comes under scrutiny

The arrival of a new preprint
server for the social sciences called SocArXiv comes just a month after news that Elsevier is acquiring
the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), a preprint
repository and online community founded in 1994 by two researchers.

Given
the concern and disappointment expressed over
the SSRN purchase by researchers, it is no surprise that the launch of SocArXiv
has been very well received. Still smarting from Elsevier’s 2013 acquisition of Mendeley – another formerly independent service
for managing and sharing scholarly papers – many (especially OA advocates) were
appalled to hear that the publisher has bought a second OA asset. The reasons for
this were encapsulated in a blog post by University of
Iowa law professor Paul Gowder entitled “SSRN
has been captured by the enemy of open knowledge”.

This
concern has also attracted the attention of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) which has
launched a review of the SSRN purchase. The FTC is currently contacting many
institutions and experts in scholarly publishing to assess the implications of the
acquisition, presumably in order to decide whether it needs to intervene in
some way.

Elsevier
is understandably keen to downplay the interest the US government is showing in
its latest acquisition. “The Federal Trade Commission is conducting a routine,
informal review of our acquisition of the Social Sciences Research network,” vice president and head of global corporate relations at Elsevier Tom Reller emailed
me. “Elsevier’s interest in SSRN is and has been about SSRNs’ ethos, a place
where it is free to upload, and free to download. We are working cooperatively
with the FTC, and believe that the review will conclude favourably.”

In
other words, Elsevier does not believe the FTC’s interest in its purchase will
lead to a formal investigation.

But however
timely SocArXiv’s launch may be, the service is not a response to the SSRN
acquisition, the director of the new service, and professor of sociology at the
University of Maryland, Philip Cohen assured me. “We were already in planning
before we heard about the SSRN purchase.”

That
said, the fledgling service is clearly keen to ride the wave of discontent that
Elsevier’s latest move has engendered: it has begun to host preprints by means of a temporary
arrangement until the platform’s construction is completed.

So what
is SocArXiv? As the name suggests, it is modelled on the physics preprint
server arXiv, and describes itself as a free,
open access, open source archive for social science research. Authors are able
to upload their preprints to the service and make them freely available to all.
The papers will be provided with permanent identifiers to allow them to be linked
to the latest version, or to versions published elsewhere. They can also be
made available under Creative Commons licences, and analytics data will be provided
to show how often papers have been accessed.

Registration
to the service will be free and open to all, regardless of academic affiliation.
In addition, registered users will be able to comment on and discuss papers.

A
branded service

However,
unlike arXiv – which was conceived (and still largely continues to act) as a supplement
to the traditional scholarly publishing system, it is hoped that SocArXiv will disrupt
the traditional system, and help to eventually supplant it.

On the LSE blog, Cohen writes, “I
hope that SocArXiv will enable us to save research from the journal system.
Once it’s built, anyone will be able to use it to organise their own
peer-review community, to select and publish papers (though not exclusively),
to review and comment on each other’s work — and to discover, cite, value, and
share research unimpeded.”

Or
as Cohen put it to me: “In the end I
believe we need to replace the current journal system. I hope SocArXiv
helps us move in that direction.”

“I’m
very optimistic about SocArXiv,” Gowder told me. “The platform doesn’t seem to
be fully online yet (the upload process seems quite convoluted, for example),
but I don’t see any reason why they can’t get wide usage among political
science and law as well as sociology.”

It
is important to note that SocArXiv is being built on an open source platform
developed by the Center for Open Science (COS). “It is their
platform which they offer free,” explains Cohen.

Brian Nosek

Founded
in 2013, COS is a non-profit organisation based in Charlottesville, Virginia, and
over the past three years it has developed a range of services designed “to
increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research”. At
the heart of the project is the Open Science Framework (OSF) which, says COS executive
director Brian Nosek, consists of two main
components – a back-end application framework and a front-end view (interface).
“The back-end framework is an open-source, general set of tools and services
that can be used to support virtually any service supporting the research
lifecycle.”

In other
words, multiple different interfaces and services can be built on top of the
OSF, and SocArXiv will be using one of those interfaces. “SocArXiv will simply
be a branded service built on a generalised OSF pre-print service which will be offered so
that anyone from any discipline can share research manuscripts with their community
and receive feedback,” explains Matt Spitzer, COS Community
Manager.

This
is important because it means that SocArXiv is likely to be just the first of many
such initiatives we can expect to emerge from OSF. “We are envisioning that
services for other disciplines will be built on the same platform, and we are
discussing this with several groups already,” says Spitzer. “The general
service will be referred to simply as OSF Preprints, but as other groups use
the platform for a specific subset, they can brand the site however they wish.”

Collective mistake

But
perhaps the real significance of SocArXiv – and the OSF – is that it points
to a growing reluctance within the research community to rely on legacy
publishers, or indeed any for-profit organisation (as SSRN always was). In
retrospect, says Gowder, “I think
legal academia and the other disciplines that made heavy use of SSRN made a
serious collective mistake in the first place, entrusting their repositories of
open knowledge to a for-profit enterprise run in a non-transparent fashion.”

It also
reminds us that many observers of the open access movement are having to
conclude that the initial strategy and approach of the movement was
misconceived, since it assumed that it would be sufficient to persuade legacy
publishers to embrace open access. By doing so, it was believed, not only would
research become more open, but the high and constantly rising costs associated
with scholarly communication could be reduced.

In
the event, open access is increasing costs rather than reducing them, and
publishers are seeking alternative ways of enclosing publicly-funded research –
to their own benefit, not the benefit of the research community.

Of
course this should not have come as a surprise. Legacy publishers were always
going to try to protect their revenues, and they were always going to seek to
maintain control of the publishing process in order to do that. That is simply
what for-profit companies do.

Indeed,
seen from the perspective of Elsevier, the acquisitions of Mendeley and SSRN were
both very smart moves. Speaking to me on a non-attributable basis, a member of
the financial community who has followed the publishing industry for a number
of years said that the acquisitions “demonstrate that Elsevier is following a
very clever strategy.”

He explained: “By investing in
businesses like Mendeley and SSRN they are getting closer and more intimately
connected to researchers and academics. It is a very intelligent way to ‘future
proof’ Elsevier from massive changes in how the economics of academic research
dissemination work.”

He
adds, “If OA happens, being close to authors will matter a great deal: the more
interactions between authors and Elsevier, the more likely they are to submit
their articles for publication on Elsevier journals. In addition, there may be
pricing benefits if Elsevier happens to provide additional services to authors
(for example, connectivity, dissemination, hosting and storage of underlying
data, etc.)”

The
problem is that while such a strategy might suit Elsevier, it is far from clear
that it will benefit the research community. As Geoffrey Bilder has pointed out, the OA movement
assumed it was sufficient to make scholarly material freely available. Today,
however, it is discovering that the scholarly infrastructure is itself being
enclosed in the process. Consequently, he argues, “All the things we have been
doing to liberate content and data is under threat because organisations are
developing tools and environments and systems where in order to access that
data and content we have to go and interact within enclosed walls. If that
continues then we will see many of the benefits that have been gained from
liberating content and data undone”.

Some
will doubtless deny that this is, or will ever become, the case with Mendeley
and SSRN, but the fact is that both now belong to a large commercial organisation
accustomed to enjoying very high profits. Elsevier is not
going to give up those profits without a fight.

The important
point is that what non-profit services like SocArXiv can offer that commercial
sites like Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Mendeley and SSRN cannot offer is what SocArXiv’s
web site describes as a “non-commercial,
open-source alternative to this enclosure of the commons”.

It
is no surprise therefore that many are concluding that it is time for the
research community to wean itself off for-profit publishers. As Gowder put it on his blog, any
scholarly publishing effort now needs to be “Organised as a non-profit or trust
with legal obligations to offer its services for free and remain unowned by any
for-profit entity (to protect it from future Elsevier buyouts).”

And
this is why the COS platform is so interesting.

Two
paths

Essentially, the research community now finds itself at a crossroads. If it takes one path it
will likely remain in thrall to the so-called Academic Publishing
Oligopoly,
and have to continue paying over the odds for the services and infrastructure
its needs to publish and share its research.

If
it takes the second path it can hope to recover its ownership of scholarly
communication, and in the process regain control of costs. It is this second path
that is the long-term goal of SocArXiv (and presumably of COS). Commenting on
the SSRN purchase Cohen says, “I regret the acquisition of anything by Elsevier.
We should be moving in the direction of non-profit, open-source, and
open-access publishing, not away from it.”

As
if to underline this point, last Friday reports emerged that SSRN
was unilaterally taking down PDFs from its service, citing copyright concerns.
This led to many complaints on Twitter, with Gowder declaring, “I am de-publishing
every single article from SSRN immediately. Please join me. Only a swift
community response will deter these people.”

SSRN
responded in a tweet: “We sent the
wrong email – that’s it – nothing has changed in our policies. There isn’t some
big conspiracy happening.”

“If
they just sent the wrong e-mail, as they risibly claim over Twitter, what
explains the string of surprise takedowns people are reporting?” responds
Gowder. “Maybe they meant to send a nicer e-mail with the surprise takedowns? The
problem is the surprise takedowns, not the tone of the e-mail.”

This
incident has been covered at Techdirt here. Meanwhile, my
several emails to SSRN CEO Gregg Gordon have so far gone unanswered.

Philip Cohen

But
what will it take to regain ownership of scholarly communication? Above all, it
will require the research community to share more – and to co-operate and partner
more – in order to build the alternative infrastructure, an infrastructure open
in every sense of the word. “The good news is that there are no real barriers
between truly open research products,” says Cohen. “Different technology and
communities can pursue different innovative strategies, but in the end the research
materials that we disseminate can be integrated with anyone else’s. I like to
say, ‘meet you at the metadata’”.

Here
again COS looks to be key, because the OSF is designed to facilitate exactly
this kind of sharing, and COS is committed to an open-source approach. It is
also busy recruiting other universities to its platform. “We have a beta
community of universities participating in OSF
for Institutions
to provide a seamless experience for researchers into the OSF,” says Nosek.
“Some partners are: Notre Dame, University of Southern California, University
of Virginia, and UC Riverside.” [More here].

OSF
can also add value to institutional repositories. “Most institutions have
repositories already, but submission compliance is usually very low, many are
not built for modern research outputs – code, 3D images, etc. – and they do
little to surface valuable insight about active research,” says Spitzer. “In
addition, many are exploring ways to connect their existing institutional repositories
to the OSF and connect them to the research workflow, which they are not today.”

Importantly,
OSF Preprints can also aggregate search results across all the sub groups using
it.

Three challenges

However,
the research community faces three significant challenges. First, it will be
necessary to reallocate money currently being used to pay journal subscriptions
to fund new non-profit open access initiatives. This need comes at a
particularly difficult time as the OA movement has recently become enamoured
with the so-called journal “flipping” strategy (i.e. flipping subscription journals
to an OA model – see here and here). This would redirect subscription
money to paying legacy (commercial) publishers for gold OA, not to pay for non-commercial
OA initiatives.

Second,
it will require additional funding to build the necessary alternative
infrastructure.

Third,
history suggests that universities do not co-operate very well, and this is particularly
true in the neoliberal environment they now have to exist in.

Cohen
expresses his hopes in this way: “I would like to encourage academics to shift
their labour contributions from for-profit and paywalled ventures toward
non-profit and open-access institutions. At the same time, I believe the
institutions that currently pay vast sums for journal subscriptions should
shift their funds toward open-access efforts. Making this transition is one of
the most important challenges for academia of our time.”

Paul Gowder

Gowder
believes the onus is on research institutions more than individual researchers.
“Universities are getting screwed almost as badly as ordinary people are by the
current system, and the universities are the ones who have the most power to
change it.”

What
is needed, he says, is for “a big university consortium to sponsor prestigious
open-access journals in every discipline?” The challenge he concedes, is that
universities currently suffer from a “collective action problem”. But the
promise is that “They’d save a lot of
money if they could figure out how to stop paying journal subscriptions and
instead fund open scholarly dissemination.”

But it is the
second challenge that is the most interesting one, and it is this that COS and
initiatives like SocArXiv are hoping to address. It is probably important here
that the core technology work is being done by an external organisation, not universities
themselves, since universities have shown themselves to be not very good at creating
scholarly infrastructure. This is the reason for the relative failure of the institutional
repository movement (certainly in terms of ease-of-use and interoperability),
and it is presumably the reason why the University of Florida recently took the
controversial
decision
to (in effect) outsource its institutional repository to Elsevier.

We
also know that research funders are generally reluctant to fund infrastructure
projects. When they do it is inevitably short-term funding, and so the infrastructure
that has been created tends to die a death when the money runs out.

Gowder
is nevertheless optimistic. “It’s a lot cheaper to operate online services now
than it was a decade ago. As open-source tools proliferate and get better and
the costs of things like data storage and bandwidth go down, the cost picture
for these services is likely to improve.

Funding

So how
is SocArXiv being funded? “We are a program at the University of Maryland,”
says Cohen. “That means we can receive contributions or grants through the
university, and the university will ensure that our spending is consistent with
its institutional mission.”

As
part of its funding efforts, therefore, SocArXiv is currently seeking donations
on the University of Maryland web site. Cohen explains: “We hope to be funded
by the institutions and actors that currently pay for academic publishing:
universities and their publishing operations, research agencies, and
foundations. The nuts and bolts of that are yet to be determined, of course. At
present we benefit from the funding that COS already has, which will enable us
to get up and running on their preprint server and establish the need for what
we’re doing.”

He adds:
“In addition to what COS offers through their basic platform, we hope to
raise money to pay for them to add features that our community wants (like a
peer review system). Then presumably such features or tools would be open to
everyone too.”

This
would seem to offer a potential virtuous circle of co-operative funding.

Once
again, COS is key. Not only has the underlying technology work already been
done by a non-profit organisation, but the organisation concerned has shown
itself to be pretty successful at attracting money from funders. COS has received
regular grants and donations since it was founded, and currently has funding from – amongst others – the Alfred
P. Sloan Foundation,
the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National
Science Foundation (NSF) and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

What
most agree on is that the research community cannot rely on governments to protect
them from commercial predation. Commenting on the FTC’s interest in the SSRN
acquisition Gowder says, “I’m no antitrust expert, but it seems like the FTC is
unlikely to take the kind of aggressive stance that you’d need to make some
kind of anti-merger action stick here.”

The
financial expert I spoke to concurs. “I cannot imagine the FTC will take
action. Elsevier has a relatively limited share in social sciences, and its
main businesses (journals and search engines) are not directly affected by the
acquisition of SSRN. The key concern is whether the business model of SSRN will
be changed by Elsevier over time – so the FTC may still intervene to extract a
defined time period when Elsevier commits to some undertakings (for example,
keeping free uploads and free downloads for five years, or something along
those lines). I would put the probability of a formal investigation at 30% or
less.”

In
short, it would appear that the fate of scholarly communication lies in the
hands of researchers and their institutions themselves, not governments.

The
question is this: do they have the determination, the chops, and the
wherewithal to take this on? Here the jury is still out. Will they, like the
University of Florida, follow the path of least resistance? Or will they, as
the University of Maryland seems minded to do, take the harder but more
promising path?

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

"It is probably important here that the core technology work is being done by an external organisation, not universities themselves, since universities have shown themselves to be not very good at creating scholarly infrastructure."

Is this really true? E.g., ArXiv was developed at and supported by Cornell University. To be sure, individual faculty members -- Ginsparg & co in the case of ArXiv -- had to get the ball rolling. But, universities are paying their salaries, and they also support the initiative more directly via the person-power of the library staff.

In regard to the above mentioned reference to an FTC review of the SSRN acquisition, we have been informed that the investigation has been closed, and the FTC has said that no further action is warranted in their view.